Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 15 min ago
AMD Sensor Fusion Hub Driver Revved But Not On Tap For Linux 5.6
Earlier this month AMD finally published their Sensor Fusion Hub driver for Linux to improve the Ryzen laptop support. That new "SFH" driver hasn't been queued as part of any Linux 5.6 pull request but a second version of the driver did make it out this week...
Staging Changes Lighten The Linux 5.6 Kernel By More Than Thirty Thousand Lines
With Linux 5.6 the staging area has seen new functionality but thanks to removing old code it ends up removing a fair number of lines of code from the kernel...
FreeNAS 11.3 Released With A Plethoa Of Improvements
The folks at iXsystems have released FreeNAS 11.3, their latest big update to this FreeBSD-based operating system designed around the OpenZFS file-system for offering advanced network-attached storage capabilities...
RADV Re-Enables NGG Geometry Shader Support
On top of the last minute Radeon Vulkan "RADV" improvements landing on Wednesday for Mesa 20.0, another big ticket item landed... Well, re-enabled...
USB4 Support Lands In The Linux 5.6 Kernel
Ahead of USB4 devices expected to begin appearing later this year, the Linux 5.6 kernel is wired up with initial USB4 support...
Linux 5.6 Is The First Kernel For 32-Bit Systems Ready To Run Past Year 2038
On top of all the spectacular work coming with Linux 5.6, here is another big improvement that went under my radar until today: Linux 5.6 is slated to be the first mainline kernel ready for 32-bit systems to run past the Year 2038!..
AMD Zen 2 "Znver2" Optimizations With LLVM Clang 10 Bring Some Improvements
With LLVM Clang 10 having added a Zen 2 scheduler model tuned for the latest AMD CPUs over the existing "znver2" tuning that had just copied the Zen 1 scheduler, here are some benchmarks looking at the LLVM Clang 9 vs. 10 compiler performance on AMD EPYC when making use of "-march=znver2" optimizations...
Linux 5.5 Performance Overall Is Comparable To Older Kernels For Most Workloads
Since the stable release of Linux 5.5 this weekend I have been carrying out benchmarks for looking at how the performance of this newly-minted kernel compares to older releases. Here are benchmark results of Linux 5.3 vs. 5.4 vs. 5.5 with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X but the results are similar to other HEDT and lower-end systems we've tested thus far...
Linux 5.6 Kernel Adds New System Call For "openat2" - More Extensible openat()
A new system call added to the very feature rich Linux 5.6 kernel is openat2() for more extensible behavior compared to the existing openat() functionality...
There Is Experimental Patches Providing Support For DXIL Shaders With VKD3D
The Wine project's VKD3D initiative for translating Direct3D 12 support to Vulkan took another step forward today with patches for handling DXIL (Shader Model 6.0+) shaders with VKD3D, but the work in the current form may need to be re-worked...
Mesa 20.0's RADV Driver Deems Navi/GFX10 Stable, Vulkan 1.2 In Good Shape, ACO Fixes
With Mesa 20.0 scheduled for branching today (though that could be delayed a few days potentially depending upon last minute requests), there's been a flurry of Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver activity to squeeze into this first Mesa release series of 2020...
GTK4 Data Transfer APIs Being Modernized Around Wayland
Red Hat's Matthias Clasen has provided an update on one of the latest areas the GTK developers are working on finishing up with the forthcoming GTK 4.0 tool-kit... Improving the data transfer interfaces around handling for copy/paste and drag-and-drop...
We Love Performance... So We Love LibreOffice 6.4 With This Office Suite Now Running Faster
LibreOffice 6.4 is out today as the latest feature update to this cross-platform, open-source office suite...
Godot 3.2 Open-Source Game Engine Released With Better Documentation, New Features
While developers are hard at work on Godot 4.0 with Vulkan support, that release won't be ready until mid-2020 so as a result Godot 3.2 is out today as their latest stable release and serving as a "long-term support" release until transitioning to Godot 4...
The Linux 5.6 x86 Platform Driver Changes Are Busy From Quirky Laptops To New Hardware Support
Intel's Andy Shevchenko sent in the x86 platform driver updates on Monday for the newly opened Linux 5.6 merge window. There is the never-ending work on dealing with quirky Windows-focused laptops to adding new Intel hardware support and other additions...
Clang 10 + Linux 5.6 Will Be Able To Build A Working s390 Kernel
With LLVM Clang 9.0 and Linux 5.3 together it became possible to build the mainline Linux kernel with this non-GCC compiler. The x86_64 Linux kernel Clang-based kernel builds has continued to improve through newer kernel releases. This follows the mainline AArch64 (64-bit ARM) Linux kernel mainline build by Clang too, which has been of much interest by different hardware/software vendors. There hasn't been much Clang'ing kernel efforts for other architectures, but it turns out with Clang 10 and Linux 5.6 will be another working combination, this time for IBM s390...
It's Finally Time: The Time Namespace Support Has Been Added To The Linux 5.6 Kernel
The Time Namespace, which was originally proposed back in 2018 for allowing per-namespace offsets to the system clocks, has finally entered the mainline kernel in early 2020 with the in-development Linux 5.6 kernel...
WireGuard + Multi-Path TCP Were Merged Tonight Into Linux 5.6
The very exciting networking subsystem updates have made it into the Linux 5.6 kernel...
Thunderbird Mail Client Now Being Pushed Along By "MZLA Technologies Corporation"
Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client has been rather neglected the past several years with all the focus on the Firefox web browser, but as the next step forward for this mail/RSS client is now placing it under the newly-formed MZLA Technologies Corporation...
Sony Now "Officially" Maintaining The Linux PlayStation Input Driver, But Leads To Interesting Problem
It turns out Sony is now maintaining the mainline Linux kernel's hid-sony input driver in an "official capacity now across various devices." This hid-sony driver is what traditionally has supported the various PlayStation controllers and other input devices for their hardware. But their newfound "official" support for this open-source input driver could lead to interesting predicaments...